As explained above, Path MTU Discovery doesn't work as well as it should
anymore. If you know for a fact that a hop somewhere in your network has a
limited (<1500) MTU, you cannot rely on PMTU Discovery finding this out.

Besides MTU, there is yet another way to set the maximum packet size, the so
called Maximum Segment Size. This is a field in the TCP Options part of a
SYN packet.

Recent Linux kernels, and a few PPPoE drivers (notably, the excellent
Roaring Penguin one), feature the possibility to 'clamp the MSS'.

The good thing about this is that by setting the MSS value, you are telling
the remote side unequivocally 'do not ever try to send me packets bigger
than this value'. No ICMP traffic is needed to get this to work.

The bad thing is that it's an obvious hack - it breaks 'end to end' by
modifying packets. Having said that, we use this trick in many places and it
works like a charm.

In order for this to work you need at least iptables-1.2.1a and Linux 2.4.3
or higher. The basic command line is: